Radar is a detection system that employs radio waves to determine movement characteristics of a target object. Radio waves are emitted from a source, reflected from the target object, and received at a detector. For example, the reflected waves detected by a radar system may be analyzed to determine movement characteristics of the target object including, but not limited to, bearing (direction of motion) and range (distance) of the target with respect to the source. Radar has found applicability in a variety of military and commercial applications such as navigation, object tracking, object classification, collision detection, meteorology, and the like.
There exists ongoing interest in combining data acquired by radar systems with other, complementary sensing systems. In some situations, one system will possess an advantage over the other (sensitivity, sensing range, etc.). Furthermore, integrating measured data from other sensing systems with that acquired by radar systems may improve the accuracy of movement characteristics determined from analysis of collected radar data.
In order to allow an event detected by a complementary sensing system to be correlated in time with measured radar data, time synchronization protocols have been developed to coordinate timing between radar systems and complementary sensing systems. However, presently, there is no mechanism for verifying the accuracy of these protocols.